So a wise woman (thanks Pat) once told me that I was the only one that got food poisoning on a regular basis because I kept doing the unthinkable…ordering salads at bars. And that made perfect sense. Why would I go to a place famous for burgers and fried food and order the one thing that 99.9% of the other customers would never even consider ordering? That is the one way to make sure that you get the least fresh product (and worst prepared) in the joint. The post that follows definitely grows out of the fact that I am on a 2 week world wind tour of tech based conferences (in and out of English Studies) and I have attended a number of sessions from folks with varying levels of experience and familiarity with (current) scholarship in game studies and Digital Humanities.
Over the last couple of years many Digital Humanities folks have started to think about attending the conferences in our home discipline as ordering salads in a bar. And I have to admit that I was starting to think in the same way. I had started attending Rhetoric and Composition conference less and less in favor of game development and games and education conferences because they had more to offer ME. And of course it is all about me isn’t it?
Enter the epiphany. While I might not run into anything groundbreaking at games sessions at the non-games conferences there is something definitely worthwhile there. Going to these sessions often gives me a good idea of where (under)graduate students interested in games but having had little to no coursework in the area may be thinking. (Not that this is true of all folks presenting on games at these conferences but some people are presenting on research that they are conducting on their own…I was there once upon a time, most of us older folks were) But more than that, I have now realized that these sessions give me the chance to participate in a larger research community. If I am at the session I have to be interested in the topic so why not ask generative questions and offer some suggestions. I need to stop thinking about these sessions as a “teach me something” space and start thinking about it as a “thanks for making me think” space and offering folks some of my ideas. It is about reciprocity.
I have also had to work through and overcome the notion that offering suggestions to folks and asking questions that I don’t expect an answer to belittling or degrading. We all know that for some folks this has historically been the M.O. for folks seeking to silence women, graduate students, and Others, but perhaps what I am suggesting is a feminist reimagination of conference Q&A periods. Let’s focus more on what we can learn from one another within that period rather than what the presenter has to teach us (and having it stand up to some kind of science modeled scrutiny). And for me that shift in focus involves first and foremost by recognizing that that what we may have previously seen as food poisoning may not actually be.
